Zihao Ye


2017

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On-line Dialogue Policy Learning with Companion Teaching
Lu Chen | Runzhe Yang | Cheng Chang | Zihao Ye | Xiang Zhou | Kai Yu
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

On-line dialogue policy learning is the key for building evolvable conversational agent in real world scenarios. Poor initial policy can easily lead to bad user experience and consequently fail to attract sufficient users for policy training. A novel framework, companion teaching, is proposed to include a human teacher in the dialogue policy training loop to address the cold start problem. Here, dialogue policy is trained using not only user’s reward, but also teacher’s example action as well as estimated immediate reward at turn level. Simulation experiments showed that, with small number of human teaching dialogues, the proposed approach can effectively improve user experience at the beginning and smoothly lead to good performance with more user interaction data.